The position was expressed at the end of the conference of the presidents of the parliamentary groups, which approved the work agenda for the extraordinary plenary meeting of August 10 and the solemn act of closure of the parliamentary year 2020/2021 on the 13th of this month.
The leader of the parliamentary group MPLA, Virgílio de Fontes Pereira, highlighted the approval of more laws and parliamentary meetings, as well as the increase in the quality of the activity of the deputies, which translates not only in their pronouncements, but above all in what is the political alignment that the National Assembly managed to do this year.
"I think it is practically unanimous that despite the limitations of the pandemic, despite the limitations in financial terms, the National Assembly has increased, interestingly, in this period, its productivity," he stressed.
Fontes Pereira highlighted the commitment of the deputies mainly in this last period, when there was the process of punctual revision of the Constitution and when the discussion of the electoral package was entered.
"And in these two periods, it was noticeable that the quality of performance of the parliamentary groups, namely the MPLA, improved," he said, stressing also the increased capacity for legislative initiatives by the parliamentary groups, especially the majority ones.
The deputy from the majority party underlined that there were limitations, at the level of inspection, due to the impositions created by the health authorities for the prevention and combat of covid-19, which also affected the contact with the electorate.
"We hope that in the near future with the foreseeable relief of the measures linked to the pandemic, namely the sanitary fences, this may lead to a greater performance by the deputies, if only because we are also entering the legislative year that will accommodate the elections [2022]," he stressed.
The MPLA parliamentary leader said that issues related to the preparation of the elections are still to be discussed and several dossiers that are still to be dealt with at the National Assembly level are still to be signaled, so "even more heated discussions" and the probable "need to do more concertation here and there, but above all to improve the quality of the deputies' performance" are expected.
In his turn, the parliamentary leader of UNITA, Liberty Chiaka, highlighted the presentation of the Activities Report of the National Assembly during the year that will end on August 13, which he considered "substantially positive".
According to Liberty Chiaka, the performance of the assembly, which has three functions - to represent the angolans, produce and approve legislative laws, function that "has been more exercised" - fell short when it comes to monitoring and controlling the actions of the executive.
"We could certainly do more, we could also do better, but, unfortunately, the National Assembly itself, the parliamentary groups, see their activity conditioned to the availability of financial resources to finance the political activity at the level of the deputies," he lamented.
"This is the negative note regarding the poor performance of the perspective of inspection and control of the deputies to the executive, the local administration bodies and in general to the managers of the main resources of all of us," said Liberty Chiaka, recalling that his parliamentary group submitted to the president of the National Assembly several requests for parliamentary hearings that were not answered.
"Unfortunately, they were not held, we also made a special request for a CPI [parliamentary commission of inquiry] for the management of the BPC, which is only the largest state bank, for all the problems it has faced, unfortunately, this request was not scheduled, but we want to believe that in the near future, looking at the objective reality of our country, we have conditions to achieve these major challenges," he said.
The leader of the parliamentary group CASA-CE, Alexandre Sebastião André, agreed that there was a quantitative and qualitative increase in the number of laws.
"We can firmly say that there was an increase in the production of laws, from the point of view of quality we created the legislative framework so that we can improve the performance of the other organs for next year," he stressed.
Alexandre Sebastião André said he was not satisfied with the rejection of the proposal to increase the number of CASA-CE commissioners in the National Electoral Commission to two.
"The parliamentary group was not satisfied due to some positions, we still understood that we had the right to have two electoral commissioners," he stressed.
